The ‘special’ schools that aren’t schools
Restrained and scared - the £100k schools failing vulnerable children (from BBC News) There has long been a section of the “special” education system in the UK that really made no attempt to educate;...
Category: Autism
Know-nothing managers, uncaring carers
Last week there was a report (here in PDF and .docx formats) published by the National Survivor User Network, a mental health advocacy group run by people currently in or who have experience of...
Travesty of justice, travesty of science
I recently bought and read the autobiography of Jennifer Msumba, an autistic YouTuber, musician and film-maker who lives at a group home in Florida who spent seven years at an institution in Massachusetts, the...
Autism, female diagnosis and trauma
Yesterday the feminist psychologist Jessica Taylor (of Why Women Are Blamed For Everything fame) made a series of tweets about the rise in women being diagnosed with autism and ADHD and suggested that it...
“Have you tried boarding?”
The other day a parent I follow on my social media, whose autistic daughter has been out of school for much of the past several years, mentioned a programme that was on Radio 4...
How we still let our learning disabled down
A couple of weeks ago there was a documentary on BBC1 that exposed how, in the 50s and 60s, young Black children were routinely sent to schools for the “educationally sub-normal” because of the...
Burning your child’s past
Last night I saw a thread on Twitter from an individual called “Autismomum” in which she talked of burning the documents about her child’s school life in case they were discovered by the child...
Inquest travesty
This week the inquest into the death of Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with Down’s syndrome and autism who died in 2015 in a privately-run care home, Kingdom House, where he had been placed...
Coronavirus: panic buying and the dangers to disabled people
The medication review I talked about in my previous post happened today. The surgery texted me at 8am to tell me they would be carrying it out over the phone rather than face-to-face. This...
Why are St Andrew’s passing the buck?
Yesterday it was reported that Katie Fisher, the chief executive of St Andrew’s Healthcare, a charity which runs four hospitals including a large psychiatric institution in Northampton, had “spoken out” after an internal review...
On responding to anti-vaxxers
Today I saw two new articles on the issue of the measles epidemic in the USA which has been caused by the failure of parents, under the influence of anti-vaccine pseudo-science and ideology which...
What ‘lessons’ will be learned from the Amy el-Keria case?
Yesterday the Priory Group, which owns a number of private mental-health units in the UK which treat patients on contracts from the NHS as well as their ‘flagship’ private unit in Roehampton, was fined...
Autism, driving, and changes to British notification rules
Last weekend, by chance, some of us found out that people with autism spectrum disorders (principally Asperger’s syndrome) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were required to notify the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing...
Yes, the severely autistic do need a voice, but …
Recently a new organisation has been set up in the USA, the National Council on Severe Autism, based in California and run by a combination of parents and academics, a combination which has attracted...
Review: Skipping School (Dispatches, Channel 4)
Last night, at the rather late hour of 10:15pm, Channel 4 broadcast an hour-long Dispatches programme, presented by the children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, about concerns that home-schooling is being used as a cover for...
A law unto themselves
The past few weeks I’ve been in contact with the mother of an autistic teenage girl who was admitted (initially informally) to an adolescent mental health unit last July. She had been bullied at...
Do we need “a debate on mental health”?
This is a claim I have seen being made in the media on a fairly regular basis. Usually it’s about general mental health issues, and often includes a strong element of blame towards those...
Some notes on recent ATU publicity
Last week two separate stories about people with learning disabilities were in the news. One was that a woman had died following the extraction of all her teeth at a hospital in Worcester which...
High-tech barbarism
Last Tuesday evening there was a 45-minute programme on Radio 4 (part of its File on 4 slot) exposing the abusive treatment of an autistic teenage girl at the St Andrew’s hospital in Northampton,...
Transforming care? More like history repeating itself
Last night BBC’s File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government’s declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...